"Codex Gigas, otherwise known as ‘the Devil’s Bible’ is the largest and probably one of the strangest manuscripts in the world. It is so large that it is said to have taken more than 160 animal skins to make it and takes at least two people to lift it. It measures approximately 1 metre in length." Source: Ancient Origins.
"According to legend, the medieval manuscript was made out of a pact with the ‘devil’, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Devil’s Bible. It was written in Latin during the 13th century AD, and although the origin of the manuscript is unknown, a note in the manuscript states that it was pawned in the [Cistercian] monastery at Sedlec in 1295."
Note: Sedlec is the home of the bizarre Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel which contains "the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have in many cases been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel," according to Wikipedia.
"In addition to religious figures, many Gothic cathedrals are heavily ornamented with strange, leering creatures. These gargoyles are not merely decorative. Originally, the sculptures were waterspouts to protect the foundation from rain. Since most people in Medieval days could not read, the carvings took on the important role of illustrating lessons from the scriptures." Source: Thought Company.
According to Medievalists.net, "[The word 'gargoyles'] in its most technical [sense] refer[s] to waterspouts projecting from the roof of the Cathedrals. These beasts spray rain from their mouths off of the side of the roof, protecting the stones from water erosion," and would sometimes drench people as they entered the cathedrals. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the gargoyles and grotesques found in Gothic cathedral architecture is that the grotesques didn't serve as waterspouts.
Besides being important for water drainage, the gargoyles (and apparently the grotesques as well) were supposedly meant to scare away demons. In other words, they were a form of Christian superstition and warding-off magic. As a result, some believe that these weird sculptures prove the connection between the Catholic Church and Satanism and other occult practices. Some Christian writers have asked why demons would be frightened off by statues of demons -- a pretty good question, now that I think about it.
Gargoyles are normally associated with Christian cathedrals, but they have deep roots in the pagan world. According to the Washington National Cathedral's website, "Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans all employed animal-shaped waterspouts, but the ancestors of the American gargoyles are thought to date back to the 12th century. St. Bernard once disapprovingly wrote, 'What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these savage lions, and monstrous creatures?' Gargoyles caught on anyway."
Comment: Bosch (1450-1516) was a Dutch painter--one of the greatest in the world, if you ask me, and one of the strangest. Anyone who has ever taken mescaline will find something very familiar about his paintings and I've always liked to think that he was a member of an ancient secret society that used hallucinogenic plants in its rituals and had to conceal its activities from the church.
There's no evidence to support this as far as I know (other than the paintings themselves), but there has been speculation that he may have been afflicted with what was then called St. Anthony's fire, now known as ergotism, an infection caused by the grain ergot fungus which was apparently rampant at the time Bosch was alive. Ergot baked in bread can produce a kind of LSD-like substance and is known to cause delirium and hallucinations, among other things.
If Bosch did take psychedelic plants as part of some forbidden ritual, the only candidate for the plant that I can think of would be the fly agaric mushroom. It apparently grows well in northern Europe, but whether it was native to the Netherlands during Bosch's time is another question. The fly agaric mushroom, incidentally, is also known as amanita muscaria, the same mushroom that John Allegro believed was used in the ancient fertility cults that eventually evolved into Judaism and Christianity.
In "The Secret Heresy of Heironymus Bosch" (1996), author Lynda Harris argues that the bizarre symbolism in Bosch's paintings reveal that he was a member of the heretical Cathar sect which was persecuted and driven underground by the Catholic Church. I'm no expert on any of this, naturally, but her argument makes a lot of sense in some regards. Bosch's religious paintings have something demonic about them which fits in with the Catharist's (apparent) beliefs that the Catholic Church in particular and the material world in general were totally evil.
Harris' theory has been criticized for various reasons--including the fact that very little is actually known about the Cathars--but even if she's right, it still doesn't explain the strangely organic and hallucinatory nature of Bosch's symbolism. As far as I'm concerned, his paintings are all the evidence I need. Even if his paintings do contain hidden Catharist and anti-Catholic meanings, the guy was definitely tripping on something. You can see it in every detail of the Garden of Earthly Delights.
Comment: If nothing else, this huge labyrinthine archive proves that the Vatican, like any other bureaucracy, generates tons of paperwork. I suspect, though, that this "secret archive" isn't the real secret archive and I'm sure they've got more interesting -- and dangerous -- material hidden away in some underground, climate-controlled bunker that very few people know about.
The Vatican, after all, is a state in its own right with a very long history of intrigue, corruption and the occasional murder. I'm sure this book about the secret archives (The Vatican Secret Archives, Vdh Books) only contains documents that the Church decided can be safely shown to the public. Even though it's an interesting and historically important book in its own right, it's also a kind of PR effort by the church designed to counter popular conspiracy theories and show they have nothing to hide.
Nonsense. They've probably got all sorts of juicy documents hidden away somewhere. I'd love to know, for example, what kind of information they have about the early days of the church--how it was actually founded, who the original Popes were, how they managed to accumulate so much power and wealth. The real story, I think, will turn out to be radically different from anything we've been told so far.
I also suspect that they've got a lot of documents relating to more modern scandals like the alleged connections between the Vatican Bank and the Mafia and the death of "God's Banker," Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge near the financial district in London back in 1982. (Take a look at the Wikipedia photograph of Calvi on his Wikipedia page; he looks like a mafiosi.) It would be interesting to read those documents, to say the least, and I'd also like to read the transcripts from the trial of Giordano Bruno, the 16th Century philosopher who was burned at the stake.
The thing I'd most like to find out, however, is how much the Vatican knows about the origins of Christianity. It's possible, I suppose, that they don't know anything more than we do, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have secret histories that go all the way back which are locked up because they're too dangerous for the world to see. This assumes, of course, that the documents weren't destroyed long ago.
Comment: This video presents the Catholic view of the rebellion against Henry VIII's decision to take control of the church and its property in England. Whether you see the leaders of the rebellion as heroes or not depends on your perspective, but I've always thought that Henry had good reason for what he did. After all, the Catholic church was a foreign power in England and as long as Rome controlled so much English land and wealth, not to mention so many of his subjects, Henry didn't have absolute sovereignty over his own territory. No medieval king could tolerate a situation like that for long.
Henry's creation of the Church of England was triggered in part by the fact that his wife hadn't given him any sons. This was absolutely crucial, not only for the survival of his house, but for the peace and security of England. His own claim to the throne was weak and if he couldn't guarantee the succession by producing a legitimate male heir, other pretenders - some with claims just as valid as his own - would be tempted to rebel, plunging the country into bloody civil war. Women could hold power in medieval England, but in a hereditary monarchy, sons were needed because daughters couldn't marry into their own families. (In the absence of sons, if a daughter of Royal Family A married a man from Family B, her husband would become king and Family B would assume the rule of the country.)
Henry needed to divorce his wife and marry a new one, but he was forced to go begging to a foreign Pope, the autocratic head of a church that Henry and many other reformers saw as idolatrous and corrupt. When the Pope wouldn't go along, Henry did the only logical thing; he dissolved the monasteries, appropriated their land and assumed complete dominion over religion in England. The leaders of the rebellion were essentially fighting for a foreign power and they had to be crushed. The idea that they were fighting to preserve their faith is simplistic and naive, almost as naive as they were when they took Henry's word that they could keep their churches and freely practice their religion.
Maybe they rebelled for purely religious reasons, but I doubt it. I suspect that the leaders, at any rate, were more interested in hanging onto their property and privileges.
Chartres Cathedral is a spectacular example of the way Christianity usurped the old pagan religions and literally built its churches over the sacred sites of the pagan world in an attempt to erase them from history.
According to Chartres Cathedral.net, "the town of Chartres has been of religious importance since ancient times. It was the site of Druid ceremonies, which were held around a well that was later discovered under the cathedral crypt.
"Sometime later, a Gallo-Roman temple stood on the same spot. The early Christians erected a basilica there during the 4th century, and St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade there in 1146. Later in history, Chartres was the coronation site of Henry IV in 1594."
Chartres is surrounded by legends, many of which can be traced back to pagan beliefs. According to Ancient Origins, "[the legendary roots of the site] come from the time when Druids, the Celtic priests of Britain and Gaul, held sacred rites there." A Druidic statue of the mother goddess of infants found at the site may have inspired the Christian legend that the pagans "had foretold the story of a virgin who would give birth to a child for the good of the world." This is speculative, but it makes sense considering the way the Christians hijacked pagan beliefs to support their new religion.
"During the Gallo-Roman times, the underground waters of the site were believed to have been revered by the Druids. Legend also says that Roman soldiers attacked Christians while they were celebrating their faith at the virgin shrine. It seems that Christians identified the mother goddess of the Druids with the virgin Mary." (Ibid)
The cathedral has been associated with the Knights Templar, the famous Catholic military order founded in 1199 to protect pilgrims traveling to the Kingdom of Jerusalem after its liberation by the First Crusade. Originally consisting of only nine men who could do little more than provide an armed escort for pilgrims to the Holy Land, the order grew into one of the richest and most powerful organizations of its day until it was violently suppressed and virtually exterminated in 1307.
Surrounded by conspiracy theories then as now, "[t]he Knights Templar have become associated with legends concerning secrets and mysteries handed down to the select from ancient times," (Wikipedia). According to Ancient Origins, the Chartres cathedral's association with the Templars comes from the two black madonnas which can be seen there:
"According to legend, the Black Madonna was a lady of the Templars. The statue of the Black Madonna with a child was commissioned in 1508. It is perhaps a black wooden copy of the silver Madonna that was located on the main altar before. The statue sits on the top of the pillar and is often called the ''Lady of the Pillar''. Before the French Revolution, the Chartres Cathedral had a second Black Madonna in the crypt. Unfortunately, it was probably burned during the revolution, although some resources are convinced that the church didn't suffer in this period. Today, tourists and pilgrims can see a copy in the church that was made in 1857. "
These black madonnas are apparently found in churches all over France and other countries in Europe.
"Throughout Europe, especially in France, about 500 Black Madonnas, painted or carved in wood or stone, stand in Catholic churches, with a few in museums. Most date from the 11th to the 15th centuries. These medieval images of the Virgin holding the Christ Child gaze benignly on their devotees, who come as pilgrims and associate them with miracles and healing." Source: Europe Up Close.
I'm not sure what to think about the Templar connection with these images, but they seem to have a pre-Christian origin. According to Europe Up Close, "[m]any scholars say that the Black Madonna is a link to religions that existed long before Christianity. Her shrines are often in locations that were once pagan shrines to Diana, Artemis of Ephesus, Cybele and other goddesses. Some Black Madonna figures look just like the Egyptian goddess Isis with her infant son Horus, showing the influence of old ways on changing faiths. Even further back than that, she may represent the archetypal Earth Mother, the ancient, eternal power of the feminine force."
The great Oswald Spengler saw the Gothic cathedrals as prime symbols of the Faustian spirit of Western civilization, but even though Spengler believed that the Classical and Western worlds were fundamentally separate, the pre-Christian influences on Christianity, especially on Catholicism, can be seen both in its teachings and its architecture. These fantastic cathedrals contain all sorts of mysteries that can be traced back to very ancient times. As for the Chartres cathedral, it's currently being restored (I'm not sure if the work has been completed yet). The renovation has apparently created a lot of controversy.
Comment: The Eucharist or Holy Communion is clearly an act of symbolic cannibalism, so it's not too surprising that the Romans, acting on vague reports of Christian rituals, would have accused the new cult of practicing actual cannibalism.
The negative Roman view of the early Christians was partly based on distorted rumors about their practices. For instance, the Christians were accused of incest because they called each other "brother and sister." And the charges of cannibalism were especially repulsive.
The Romans would have associated the stories of how Christians ate the flesh and drank the blood of their god with sieges, barbaric eastern cults and legends from Greek mythology: the Thyestean Feast, for instance, in which Atreus killed Thyestes' sons, cooked them and served them to their unknowing father. The stories aren't the same, of course, but the difference between the Communion and real cannibalism would have been lost on the practical-minded Romans.
In this case, it's hard to blame the Romans because the new religion did practice cannibalism. Symbolic cannibalism. And it still does.
Christians do what they can to obfuscate this strange practice, but it's hard to explain away the real significance of what they're doing. When Christians take communion, they are participating in an act of ritual magic in which the bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. If that isn't symbolic cannibalism, I don't know what is.
Ritual cannibalism, whether it's symbolic or real, is designed to produce a spiritual transformation. For example, warrior societies often believed -- and some still believe -- that they could absorb the power of their enemies by eating them. In the same way, the follower of a god could literally absorb the spirit and power of the god through an act of sacred cannibalism.
The Communion, a ritual with ancient pagan roots, is surrounded by a fog of mystery and mystical jargon designed to obscure its real meaning, and some theologians, in typical fashion, defend it by claiming that it simply can't be understood. According to the New Advent, for instance, "the Church honors the Eucharist as one of her most exalted mysteries, since for sublimity and incomprehensibility it yields in nothing to the allied mysteries of the Trinity and incarnation." [Emphasis added]
In other words, Christianity is a mystery religion.
The connection between the Eucharist and cannibalism is so clear that theologians are compelled to try to explain it away using doubletalk, hairsplitting and paradox to deny the obvious:
"If Catholics believe the Eucharist really is the body and blood of Christ, then they believe they are eating human flesh and drinking human blood," according to The Catholic Thing (2011). "But while holy Communion does involve eating human flesh and blood, it is not true that it is cannibalistic."
In other words, cannibalism is not cannibalism, which, by definition, is the eating of human flesh by another human being.
The article goes on to make several arguments against the idea that the Communion is actually a form of ritual or symbolic cannibalism, but none of them are very convincing. For instance, cannibals supposedly only eat the dead, but "the Eucharist is life." Therefore, the Communion can't be cannibalistic. Likewise, "the Eucharist is the whole body and blood of Jesus Christ [but] cannibals only take part of their victims." Apparently, you're not a cannibal if you eat the living and clean your plate.
Most of the arguments here are based on mysticism. For example, the Communion isn't cannibalistic because "when a Catholic receives the Eucharist, he is receiving not just flesh but glorified flesh, a resurrected and transfigured 'super body' that foreshadows the new reality of a new Heaven and a new earth." I'm not sure that this is much of an argument, though. It makes it sound like the Eucharist isn't just cannibalism, but the glorified cannibalism of a super-body with transcendental powers.
I could go on with this, but why bother? Eating human flesh and drinking human blood is obviously cannibalistic even if the flesh and blood are purely symbolic. The truth is that the Eucharist is an act of theophagy -- "feeding on a god" -- with roots in very ancient, pre-Christian fertility rituals. Theophagy is "the act of eating one's god, either literally or symbolically," according to the Free Dictionary. And millions of Christians eat their god on a regular basis around the world.
It's not surprising to find a ritual like this at the very heart of a religion which originated as a mystery cult in Hellenized Israel.
The evolution of the figure of the Virgin Mary is a good example of the way Christianity as a whole developed over the centuries. Mary hardly appears in the gospels at all, but by around the fifth (?) century AD she had become a cult figure in her own right, the "mother of mothers," "Our Blessed Lady," the "Mother of God," a demi-goddess associated with immaculate conception, perpetual virginity, maternal instincts and miraculous healing powers. In other words, the Mother Mary became a pagan goddess enshrined in the heart of the supposedly monotheistic Catholic Church.
The obscure figure of Mary -- a minor character in the Jesus story -- went through a process of what fiction writers would call "character development." Church scholars soon found all sorts of Old Testament prophecies concerning Mary, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. They discovered she had Davidic ancestry. Her background was filled in. Autobiographical details were provided concerning her parents, her hometown, her marriage to Joseph, the nature of her birth, and so on. In the gospels, Mary was little more than an extra in Hollywood terms, but by the time the church got through with her she was a lead actor, herself the product of an immaculate conception, free from original sin.
The truth is that the Virgin Mary is a fictional character who was developed like any other fictional character and transformed into a divine figure based on pagan goddesses like Vesta, "the virgin goddess of the hearth, home, and family in Roman religion," and Isis, the "'mistress of the house of life,' whose creative and nurturing functions made her the most popular divinity of the Late period in the Egyptian Fayum and delta," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). When the cult of Isis spread into Rome, her role was simplified to "protector of women and marriage; goddess of maternity and the newborn...guarantor of the fertility of fields and the abundance of harvests." (OCD)
The evolution of the mother of Jesus into a reincarnation of Vesta, Isis and other pagan goddesses isn't surprising at all because this is how the institution and teachings of the Catholic Church were created in the first place -- through a long process of religious appropriation and story development. The church at the time was actively involved in either suppressing or incorporating the ideas and symbolism of the pagan religions it had been competing with for hundreds of years. Images of the Mother Mary nursing Jesus were based on earlier images of Isis nursing the baby Horus in order to hijack the pagan religions Christianity was trying to replace. In the same way, the new Jesus cult was busy destroying pagan temples, banning its practices and building churches on top of mithraeums and pagan cemeteries all around the Mediterranean world.
The creation of Mother Mary is just one example from the culture war that made Christianity the dominant religion in the West.
"A chance discovery by a team of archeologists in Turkey may have revealed one of the most significant sites in the history of Christianity after years of fruitless searching. And they’re now planning an underwater museum." Source: RT (Sept. 2018).
The site is an ancient church submerged in Lake Iznik. According to archaeologist Mustafa Şahin, "the church ruins could mark the site where the First Council of Nicaea was held nearly 1700 years ago. [Sahin] also believes it marks the spot where Saint Neophytos was martyred in 303 AD — and that the church could have been built to honor him."
The First Council of Nicaea, convened by Constantine I in 325 AD, "was the first effort to attain consensus in the Church through an assembly representing all of Christendom,"according to Wikipedia. The council was held at Lake Ascanius, the modern Lake Iznik.
Note: This isn't exactly a new discovery. The video above, for instance, is a news report from 2015, and the next video, from 2014, shows an aerial view of the same underwater ruins. Photographers found the ruins some time ago, but the archaeologists, who have apparently been conducting field surveys at the lake since 2006, didn't hear about it until now for some reason. As far as I can tell, the connection between this ancient church and the Council of Nicaea is still a matter of speculation.
The most interesting thing about this discovery, as far as I'm concerned, is that " there is also evidence that an earlier temple dedicated to the Greek and Roman god Apollo could have been located underneath" the submerged church (RT). If that's true, then this find provides more evidence of the persecution of the pagans by the early Christians.
The traffic in holy relics was one of the biggest scams perpetuated by the medieval Catholic church, ranking up there with the sale of indulgences. Relics were tourist attractions in the middle ages, just like they are today. Back in the medieval world, an insignificant local parish could become wealthy and famous by attracting pilgrims, so it's not very surprising that relics were in high demand. They could be almost anything -- the bones of a saint, a lock of a martyr's hair, the "Holy Prepuce," the fingernails of an early church father, a vial of sweat from the brow of Jesus, a scrap of wood from the True Cross, etc., etc. Most, if not all of them, were fake, of course, but the faithful never asked any questions.
Relics are sacred power objects. They're also infectious, i.e., the magical power in a relic can be transferred to another object by contact, thus creating an almost infinite supply of relics which can then be set up in their own shrines.
"...relics aren't necessarily always body parts," according to Vice. "They come in three different flavors: First-class relics are body parts, second-class relics are pieces of clothing or things the saints touched while they were alive, and third-class relics are objects that other relics have touched. A relic has power no matter where it falls on this hierarchy, which is why you have so many lying around, and so many folks praying to them."
Body parts had the most talismanic power and were highly prized for their ability to extract money from pilgrims. For example, the bones of Saint Nicholas were thought to exude "a clear watery liquid which smells like rose water, called manna (or myrrh), which is believed by the faithful to possess miraculous powers," according to Wikipedia. The pilgrims who came to see these holy objects provided a major boost to local economies. Like modern tourists, they had to eat and sleep somewhere while they were in town. They would buy food, lodging and local products, not to mention the donations they made to the church.
Pilgrims still pay homage to the relics of St. Nicholas.
Abrahamic religions supposedly condemn idolatry, but if this isn't idolatry, I don't know what is. And there's no telling where these venerated objects came from originally. The conventional history of Nicholas's relics is a classic example of the way the relic traffic worked in the medieval world:
"Nicholas' tomb in Myra had become a popular place of pilgrimage. Because of the many wars and attacks in the region, some Christians were concerned that access to the tomb might become difficult. For both the religious and commercial advantages of a major pilgrimage site, the Italian cities of Venice and Bari vied to get the Nicholas relics. Taking advantage of the confusion, in the spring of 1087, sailors from Bari in Apulia seized part of the remains of the saint from his burial church in Myra, over the objections of the Greek Orthodox monks." (Wikipedia)
That's one story, anyway. There was no method for determining the authenticity of body parts in the middle ages, so the sailors could've just brought back some animal bones and passed them off as the bones of Saint Nicholas. Who would know the difference? And who knows if the original bones in Myra actually belonged to the saint? One way or another, the monks had good reason to complain about the theft of their valuable relics. Without them, they'd go out of business.
The Shroud of Turin, probably the most famous talismanic object associated with the Catholic church, is still a source of revenue. The church doesn't charge to view the shroud, but it attracts thousands of visitors every year and all kinds of shroud-related trip packages, hotel deals and walking tours are available at a price (1). And the controversy over the shroud's authenticity has spawned a minor publishing market for books arguing one side or another.
Next video shows Pope Francis praying in front of the Shroud of Turin back in 2015.
The belief in relics is still alive and well. In the case of the shroud, which is almost certainly a medieval forgery, many Christians are convinced that it actually shows the face of Christ despite the fact that no one knows what Jesus looked like (assuming that he ever actually existed). As for relics in general, a lot of people, especially in the third world, still believe that the remains of saints and various objects associated with church legends have some kind of supernatural power to heal disease and forgive sins.
In other words, a lot of Christians are devout fetishists.
The Eucharist & Cannibalism
Comment: The Eucharist or Holy Communion is clearly an act of symbolic cannibalism, so it's not too surprising that the Romans, acting on vague reports of Christian rituals, would have accused the new cult of practicing actual cannibalism.
The negative Roman view of the early Christians was partly based on distorted rumors about their practices. For instance, the Christians were accused of incest because they called each other "brother and sister." And the charges of cannibalism were especially repulsive.
The Romans would have associated the stories of how Christians ate the flesh and drank the blood of their god with sieges, barbaric eastern cults and legends from Greek mythology: the Thyestean Feast, for instance, in which Atreus killed Thyestes' sons, cooked them and served them to their unknowing father. The stories aren't the same, of course, but the difference between the Communion and real cannibalism would have been lost on the practical-minded Romans.
In this case, it's hard to blame the Romans because the new religion did practice cannibalism. Symbolic cannibalism. And it still does.
Christians do what they can to obfuscate this strange practice, but it's hard to explain away the real significance of what they're doing. When Christians take communion, they are participating in an act of ritual magic in which the bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. If that isn't symbolic cannibalism, I don't know what is.
Ritual cannibalism, whether it's symbolic or real, is designed to produce a spiritual transformation. For example, warrior societies often believed -- and some still believe -- that they could absorb the power of their enemies by eating them. In the same way, the follower of a god could literally absorb the spirit and power of the god through an act of sacred cannibalism.
The Communion, a ritual with ancient pagan roots, is surrounded by a fog of mystery and mystical jargon designed to obscure its real meaning, and some theologians, in typical fashion, defend it by claiming that it simply can't be understood. According to the New Advent, for instance, "the Church honors the Eucharist as one of her most exalted mysteries, since for sublimity and incomprehensibility it yields in nothing to the allied mysteries of the Trinity and incarnation." [Emphasis added]
In other words, Christianity is a mystery religion.
The connection between the Eucharist and cannibalism is so clear that theologians are compelled to try to explain it away using doubletalk, hairsplitting and paradox to deny the obvious:
"If Catholics believe the Eucharist really is the body and blood of Christ, then they believe they are eating human flesh and drinking human blood," according to The Catholic Thing (2011). "But while holy Communion does involve eating human flesh and blood, it is not true that it is cannibalistic."
In other words, cannibalism is not cannibalism, which, by definition, is the eating of human flesh by another human being.
The article goes on to make several arguments against the idea that the Communion is actually a form of ritual or symbolic cannibalism, but none of them are very convincing. For instance, cannibals supposedly only eat the dead, but "the Eucharist is life." Therefore, the Communion can't be cannibalistic. Likewise, "the Eucharist is the whole body and blood of Jesus Christ [but] cannibals only take part of their victims." Apparently, you're not a cannibal if you eat the living and clean your plate.
Most of the arguments here are based on mysticism. For example, the Communion isn't cannibalistic because "when a Catholic receives the Eucharist, he is receiving not just flesh but glorified flesh, a resurrected and transfigured 'super body' that foreshadows the new reality of a new Heaven and a new earth." I'm not sure that this is much of an argument, though. It makes it sound like the Eucharist isn't just cannibalism, but the glorified cannibalism of a super-body with transcendental powers.
I could go on with this, but why bother? Eating human flesh and drinking human blood is obviously cannibalistic even if the flesh and blood are purely symbolic. The truth is that the Eucharist is an act of theophagy -- "feeding on a god" -- with roots in very ancient, pre-Christian fertility rituals. Theophagy is "the act of eating one's god, either literally or symbolically," according to the Free Dictionary. And millions of Christians eat their god on a regular basis around the world.
It's not surprising to find a ritual like this at the very heart of a religion which originated as a mystery cult in Hellenized Israel.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Catholic Church, Christianity, Commentary, Religion, Ritual Sacrifice, Videos | Permalink